


(kiss me) it's nice to be alive

by manycoloureddays



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 19:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21463495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manycoloureddays/pseuds/manycoloureddays
Summary: There’s a moment —  a brief, uncomplicated beautiful moment — when Stan remembers Mike. Mike Hanlon. Mike, how did he forget? Derry, The Losers, Bill and Richie and Eddie and Bev and Ben and Mike, who is on the phone and talking to him and real. It was all real, the bikes and the rock war and ice cream dripping down his wrist and friendships that felt so big and permanent, bigger than Derry, bigger than the adults around them.
Relationships: Mike Hanlon/Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Mike Hanlon/Stanley Uris
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	(kiss me) it's nice to be alive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heroic_pants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heroic_pants/gifts).

> title from it's nice to be alive by ball park music (a very stanley song, thank you very fucking much canon)
> 
> for the prompt: jolting awake after a nightmare and being comforted
> 
> warning for: depictions of panic attacks and references to a suicide attempt, but i do promise this is an everybody lives fic because canon? i don't know her.

There’s a moment — a brief, uncomplicated beautiful moment — when Stan remembers Mike. Mike Hanlon. _Mike,_ _how did he forget? _Derry, The Losers, Bill and Richie and Eddie and Bev and Ben and _Mike_, who is on the phone and talking to him and real. It was all real, the bikes and the rock war and ice cream dripping down his wrist and friendships that felt so big and permanent, bigger than Derry, bigger than the adults around them. A love so lasting it didn’t even really need the blood oath. 

Blood oath. Promise. Pennywise.  _ No.  _

The moment’s gone. 

Stan is in the dark, alone. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. They left him. They left him alone. Alone in the dark with, with, with.  _ No. No. No.  _

‘Stan? Stan, are you there? Are you okay?’ Mike’s voice is far away, small through the phone speaker and Stan’s panicked breathing. 

Stan nods. Remembers Mike can’t see him. Tries to breathe through the memories crashing in on him. He can’t see his own hand in front of his face, but he can feel those teeth on his skin. Smell the rotting breath. He can see Eddie beside him, tiny but taking up so much more space than Stan ever did, at the mouth of the sewers. Mike’s shoulder covered in Stan’s tears and out of the corner of his eye that house. Richie’s hand waving in his face, demanding a high five. Bill’s eyes, demanding something of Stan he wasn’t old enough to understand, isn’t brave enough to give. 

Mike is still talking, starting to sound panicked himself. 

‘Stan? Talk to me, please.’

‘I’m here,’ Stan gasps. He remembers marvelling at Eddie’s ability to talk through his panic when all it seemed to do was make Stan quieter. Knows that’s a thought his brain has snagged on in the decades since he left Derry, and wonders how he didn’t know. How can he have forgotten them all. They are in his DNA, in everything he is as a person. ‘I’m here, Mike.’

Stan presses the phone closer to his ear, like he can get closer to Mike that way. Draw strength from him, the way he did that summer. He curls his free hand around his knee and counts slowly back from ten. He listens to Patty moving around the kitchen.  _ Buenos Aires. We’re going to go to Buenos Aires in the summer.  _

‘We need you to come back. You need to come home.’ Mike is gentle, and Stan remembers that tone now. The tone that was like tiptoeing. It doesn’t mean he can do this. He knows, he  _ knows _ he can’t do this. 

‘I don’t know, I don’t know …’ Stan chokes out. His voice isn’t working properly. He can feel himself freezing. He is thirteen, not forty. He tries again, closes his eyes, counts backwards from ten. Listens to Patty hum along to whatever song has been stuck in her head all evening. He doesn’t recognise it, but he follows the tune. Listens to her opening cupboards. 

He can feel himself coming apart even as he tries to ground himself. He doesn’t realise he’s bitten through his tongue until the blood sits heavy at the back of his throat. He doesn’t want this, doesn’t want this, doesn’t want this. He didn’t want it at thirteen. Couldn’t do it at thirteen. He can’t do it now. He can’t. He’s not brave like the others, he can’t follow Bill blindly into a horror house, he can’t follow Mike’s voice home. He can’t. Not for the memory of Ben’s hand on his shoulder, Bev’s bright laugh, Eddie’s gentle hands on his scars, Richie’s beam when he made Stan giggle, Mike’s steady warmth. Not for even for the memory of Bill’s back at the head of their pack, the invincible feeling of them, all of them together in their  _ themness _ . 

Or maybe it’s for them. Maybe it’s for them and that’s why he can’t drag his mind away from the simple solution. Offering himself up to the dark. For them. To keep them safe. He can do this. He can do this for them. Because if there is one thing in the world scarier than that fucking clown, it’s losing them again. Stan would do anything, give anything, to keep them all alive. 

He is sweating through his clothes. He can’t hear anything anymore. Not Mike, not Patty, not the unsteady tripping of his heart. 

Stan’s body has stopped taking its orders from his mind. He watches himself drop his phone on the couch. He stands a little outside himself as he walks up the stairs, the only sound a rushing, howling nightmare noise that seems to bypass his ears and settle inside his skull. He shudders with it.

He runs a bath. He remembers running a bath before. He gets undressed. Remembers doing that too. An eerie sense of deja vu. The bathtub and the phone call and Mike’s voice saying his name and Bill’s determined face and the glass in his hand and the old scar tingling as he brings the razor … 

‘Stan.  _ Stanley _ .’ There are hands on his shoulders and he’s not lying in water but on a mattress. His breath catches in the back of his throat, but the hands on his shoulders start rubbing small circles and there’s the years-familiar warmth of Patty curled up on his right, and the new-old weight of Mike on his left, and he finds himself settling back into his body. ‘You’re safe, Stan. You’re here. You’re with us.’ 

Stan breathes in deep and pushes the dream out of his mind. It’s so much easier to do that when he wakes like this — caught between the two people he loves. Patty’s breathing is still heavy, asleep and not quite snoring, but her hand is warm where it’s curled around his hip. 

Feeling ridiculous and embarrassed and sleep heavy, his heart still racing, Stan finally opens his eyes. Mike’s face hovers above his, eyes worried. He pushes Stan’s sweat-damp curls off his forehead, and Stan leans into the touch. Heat spreads through his body from that point of contact. He unfreezes, and rolls into Mike’s side, buries his face in his chest. Patty shuffles close in behind him. Stan listens to the steady beat of Mike’s heart.

Mike is murmuring to him, quiet in the dark. ‘You’re here. You’re safe. We’ll never leave you, you’ll never have to be alone in the dark again. You’re here. I’m here. I promise. Always, Stan. Always.’ 

He never makes Stan feel anything but safe in the small hours when the nightmares hit. Stan always tries to return the favour when their roles are reversed. Everything is softened by the dark, and Stan feels safe to come back to himself, to this present self, slow and unhurried. 

Mike’s arms are around him, hands running up and down his back, and Stan is always going to be so fucking thankful for this. For knowing Mike again, for knowing all of them again. For his wife, who somehow believed every story he told her about Derry, and not only did not begrudge his falling back in love with Mike when the memories of their teenage years hit him like a ton of bricks but who let herself fall for Mike too. They are both so brave, make him so much braver than he thought he could be. He is thankful for nights spent with the two of them, even when the nightmares come. He gets this for the rest of his life, and that is worth all the effort it took to get out of the bath and call Mike back, let him know how hard it was going to be to get himself to Derry. 

He remembers the shame of that phone call but it is coloured now with the feeling of love that comes with every memory of his old-new family, even the ones filled with fear. 

When he had said, voice shaking, that he could not make it to Derry on his own, Mike had told him not to worry. 

‘I’ll call Bill. He’s flying out tomorrow, I’m sure he’d fly through Atlanta if it means we get to have you here with us. We need you, Stan. It has to be all of us. We’re so much stronger together.’ 

And half an hour later he had been on a video call with Bill, and they both had tears in their eyes, and Stan was thinking  _ how could I have forgotten you? How could I have forgotten that I would walk through fire for you? Walk into what I thought would be my death for you? How could that feeling have gone away?  _

In the dark of their bedroom, nine months after the scariest few days of his life — scariest since he was thirteen and alone in the dark — Stan is so thankful to his past self he could cry. Instead he burrows further into Mike’s chest, keeping hold of Patty’s hand, still on his hip. 

He presses a kiss to Mike’s chest, right over his beating heart. ‘Thank you,’ he whispers. 

‘For you,’ Mike whispers back, lips brushing Stan’s hair, ‘anything.’

Stan believes him. 


End file.
